Glaciers in the south: a comprehensive framework for evaluating public school district capacities for cryosphere education

Abstract

Rising sea levels have disproportionately large impacts on Southern coastal regions of the United States, and to a greater degree among communities therein affected by socioeconomic inequalities. Despite this, research in one of the leading causes of global sea level rise, melting ice (i.e., the cryosphere), is largely left behind in the curricula of public middle and high school institutions throughout these southern states. As rates of sea level rise continue to increase, an assessment of educational capacities within the context of present-day access to climate and cryosphere education in the United States becomes increasingly important. In this study, we apply an inductive coding method to current public-school curricula at the "8th to 12th" grade levels to assess the capacities of Southern schools to support strengthened cryosphere and sea level rise education. This developed framework can be applied to school systems across the United States and ranks availability of access, capacities form and connections to cryosphere and sea level rise education. The results of this study indicate a great potential to connect sea level rise and cryosphere education to the impacts and experiences of coastal communities in the United States, as well as capacities to forge new collaborations between funded university-level research centers and local communities to support educational access. Future work will quantify the identified capacities within southern public school science curricula in an actionable manner for use by Boards of Education, politicians, and scientists in sea level rise and cryospheric science spaces.